Second Life creator steps down at Linden Lab

Philip Rosedale, founder of company that created Second Life, to chair board

Deborah Gage, Chronicle Staff Writer

Published 4:00 am, Saturday, March 15, 2008

Photo: PAUL CHINN

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###Live Caption:Linden Lab CEO and founder Philip Rosedale is stepping down and will become chairman once a replacement is found###Caption History:virtualeconomy01_077_pc.jpg
Linden Lab CEO and founder Philip Rosedale plays his company's latest version of Second Life, a popular online game on 7/27/05 in San Francisco, Calif. Second Life is a virtual world that is part computer game, part Internet chat room, part unscripted movie set. Some players, through their characters, make imaginary goods which they sell � sometimes for real money.
PAUL CHINN/The Chronicle Ran on: 08-01-2005
Philip Rosedale, founder and CEO of Linden Lab, plays his company's latest version of Second Life, an online game.
Ran on: 09-15-2006
Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale plays Second Life, his company's popular online fantasy role-playing game. Hackers have created fears about whether more reality might intrude even more on the virtual world.###Notes:###Special Instructions:MANDATORY CREDIT FOR PHOTOG AND S.F. CHRONICLE/NO SALES - MAGS OUT less

###Live Caption:Linden Lab CEO and founder Philip Rosedale is stepping down and will become chairman once a replacement is found###Caption History:virtualeconomy01_077_pc.jpg Linden Lab CEO and founder Philip ... more

Photo: PAUL CHINN

Second Life creator steps down at Linden Lab

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Philip Rosedale, the founder and chief executive of Linden Lab in San Francisco, said Friday that he will step down, sending the company that created the virtual world Second Life on a hunt for a CEO.

Rosedale will become chairman of the board once the new CEO is found and plans to devote himself full time to "vision, strategy and design" at Linden Lab, he wrote in his blog.

"Second Life is my life's work, and I am not going anywhere!" he wrote. "As a community member, you will probably see more of me in-world."

Rosedale is known as a visionary who has been interested in virtual worlds for most of his life.

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Tom Boellstorff, an associate professor of anthropology at UC Irvine who is writing a book on Second Life, said that when Rosedale was a teenager, he rigged the door to his bedroom with a garage door opener so it would open vertically "like a star ship."

He also is deeply involved in the day-to-day running of the company, according to Thomas Malaby, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, who spent much of 2005 at Linden Lab and is writing a book of his own.

"It's remarkable that they've been able to keep in balance two such contradictory efforts - to create a space of free creation and avoid having a governmental role - for so long," he said.

Members of Second Life create and dress avatars who live, work and conduct business in the virtual world. Rosedale founded Linden Lab in 1999, and by 2004, Second Life had 5,000 accounts and could accommodate 200 people at once, Boellstorff said.

The number of residents continues to increase, according to Linden Lab. Nine million moved in from October 2006 to October 2007, but it is not possible to determine if they remain active, according company metrics. As of Friday, there were 12.8 million residents, and 234,000 users logged in over the past seven days.

But Linden Lab has had growing pains. Second Life's technology platform occasionally has been challenged by the virtual world's explosive growth, causing computers to crash or avatars to sink up to their necks while standing at Town Hall meetings. In July, Linden Lab intervened to restrict gambling in Second Life to comply with state and federal laws, and in January it banned in-world banks after one such bank, Ginko Financial, collapsed and several others defaulted on loans.

In December, Rosedale asked Linden Lab's co-founder and chief technology officer, Cory Ondrejka, to leave the company due to "irreconcilable" differences over how Linden Lab should be run, a view that Ondrejka confirmed in his blog.

Boellstorff said that while Linden Lab is a pioneer of virtual worlds, Second Life now has lots of competition from companies with new ideas and newer technology. "When you log on (to Second Life), you have to meet people. ... It's a blank canvas, and not everyone wants that," he said.

Mitch Kapor, an investor in Linden Lab who is now chairman of the board, said the company plans to work on making Second Life easier to use so that more people will stick around.

He said a new CEO will have to work closely with Rosedale - "like getting married" - the way Google CEO Eric Schmidt has managed to work with Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Google's younger and more technical co-founders.

Linden Lab's board is now in the middle of making fundamental decisions about its strategy and where Linden Labs will compete, Kapor said. "We expect the competition to be very intense and from all sides."

Boellstorff said it's impossible to imagine all the changes that are coming to virtual worlds.

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